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5 Mar, 6 tweets, 2 min read
Be aware that I will *NEVER* run a raffle, prize draw, or giveaway on social media. (My publishers might, but I don’t.) I’m not able to mail books directly from my home office without a lot of heavy lifting.

(I may donate items for charities to auction, but again: not directly.)
Also note that my Facebook account is moribund/unused and I refuse to use other Facebook services—Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. (Facebook are evil and need to die.)
My “no giveaways” rule exists because to mail a parcel I have to carry it two-thirds of a mile uphill to a post office that is inaccessible by vehicle, then queue for counter service (in a pandemic). Books are heavy, y’all! And pickup from my doorstep isn’t practical either.
There *is* another post office, only half a mile away and downhill! But it’s tiny, has shorter opening hours … and there’s no parking or bus stops nearby. (And it’s a steeper uphill walk home afterwards.)
How heavy are books, really?

Well, a typical Charlie Stross hardcover edition, bubble-wrapped in a mailer, weighs 750 grams. (I know this because I’ve weighed them). I have a bad back, so maximum capacity is 10-15 books in a backpack at one time or I’ll injure myself.
If I lived at ground level and could park my car directly outside and drive to a post office with a car park, giveaways (and selling signed copies via eBay) would be reasonable. Unfortunately I don’t, so those are the breaks.

/end

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More from @cstross

Charlie Stross Profile picture
17 Sep 20
Honestly, the BEST solution to Tory whining about the UK’s voice not being heard in the EU would have been to fission into NI, Wales, Scotland, and England back in the 1990s. Then we could have had 4 seats on the Council of Ministers, 4 votes, all with about 90% common interests.
With full Schengen membership on top, the 4 former UK states would have had free movement, no internal borders, and disproportionate combined lobbying weight in Brussels.
Instead? Because of misplaced Imperial nostalgia we’re doomed to get the worst possible outcome: fragmentation of the UK without the benefits of EU trade links and soft power.

All it needed was a determination to *lead* the EU, rather than sulk. But the Tories screwed up.
Read 4 tweets
Charlie Stross Profile picture
1 Sep 20
Satire is dead, my last alternate-present book is off to production, and I’m fleeing screaming back to the relative topical safety of boringly conservative space opera where I don’t have to worry about the theatre of the absurd becoming institutionalized as the new normal.
Ahem: I mean “boringly conservative space opera” by *my* standards. A setting with psychopomp starships, Soyuz capsules and paleolithic hand-axes are indistinguishable in their antiquity, science is a completed human project, and genetically-engineered religiosity leads to wars.
Also genderflipped queer anti-racist Flash Gordon vibes, to offset the high concept setting a little.
Read 4 tweets
Charlie Stross Profile picture
22 Aug 20
What COVID-19 has taught us about the Zombie Pandemic:

1) There will be Zombie Parties so you can catch the virus and acquire herd immunity faster.
What COVID-19 has taught us about the Zombie Pandemic:

2) Facebook bots will gaslight your ranty uncle and explain that it's a conspiracy to get you to willingly be uplifted by black helicopters for relocation into the concentration camps FEMA has prepared for you.
What COVID-19 has taught us about the Zombie Pandemic:

3) Televangelist grifters will offer to sell you magic UV lamps that kill zombies/a can of bleach to spray up your ass to make you unpalatable/guaranteed salvation if you're bitten.
Read 9 tweets
Charlie Stross Profile picture
2 Aug 20
Seeing discussions of the SF canon on twitter, I’m realizing now that I read much of the canon back in the day because I began reading SF about 50 years ago, and *there wasn’t a lot else on the shelves*. Most of the field today is newer.

/1
A lot of the golden age SF authors were *terrible* writers. Lots of vision, but wooden characterisation, poor descriptive skills, emphasis on melodrama over structure, and so on. They’d be unpublishable today unless they upped their game enormously.

/2
I’ll give them a conditional pass (mostly) on social/cultural change—if you live in a society where pervasive sexism and racism are the norm and you’re not the target of discrimination, it’s difficult to notice and avoid replicating it to some extent. But …

/3
Read 7 tweets
Charlie Stross Profile picture
7 Jun 20
The target age group for “Harry Potter” in the year it was written (probably 1995—publishing a book takes a couple of years) would have been born around 1988, so are now 32-33 ish. “People who grew up with Harry Potter” includes parents now introducing their kids to the books. /1
Purely in cold-blooded marketing terms it seems like a SPECTACULARLY bad idea for long term revenue growth to actively antagonize your fan base just as your fandom is becoming generational. /2
My inference is that (a) JKR is deeply, emotionally committed to TERFdom at this point, and (b) there are probably movie studio (and book publisher) executives in the background, frantically trying to get her to STFU, and failing. /3
Read 6 tweets
Charlie Stross Profile picture
4 Jun 20
@PaulHenni @rupertg What happened:

a) Editor John W. Campbell liked a lot of crankish nonsense in his SF—Dean Drive, psionics, dianetics, and so on. So he published a lot of it. But he died in 1971.

b) The Koestler Parapsychology Unit comprehensively examined and debunked it in the 1980s/90s.

/1
@PaulHenni @rupertg So a formerly semi-respectable SF idea turned into quackery over a 20 year period. And new SFnal chew-toys came along.

Postscript: Campbell was a grotesque racist and authoritarian and I note a lot of overlap between theosophy, belief in the paranormal, and Nazi mysticism.

/2
@PaulHenni @rupertg The aggressive romantic streak in totalitarianism and racism had an affinity for narratives about psi powers, hidden master races, and spiritualism. (“You can be superior … without showing any outward signs!”) Go figure. *Not* a healthy belief system to base fiction on. /3
Read 4 tweets

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